A Private Audience with the Masters

Two Dickinsonians take care of Chicago’s art treasures

By Barbara Snyder

Chicago is a city of superlatives. It boasts the world’s longest street, tallest building and busiest airport. It’s home to the first roller skates, Cracker Jacks and the zipper. The city has a reputation for being a tough town with cold, windy weather and a history made calamitous by gun-toting gangsters and a great, big fire.

But forget Al Capone and Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow. When you think Chicago, think art.

Stephanie D’Alessandro ’88 and Marla Hand ’77 are both curators in Chicago. Their jobs are fundamentally different, but their responsibilities afford each of them an uncommon intimacy with some of the most important art in the world.

Stephanine D'Alessandro spends her days with iconic art such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte

Looking up Picasso’s Skirt
“If you like impressionists, this is the place,” D’Alessandro says. The Art Institute of Chicago has 300,000 works of art in 10 curatorial departments, including the largest collection of impressionist paintings outside Paris. As assistant curator of modern and contemporary art, D’Alessandro works with a busy, evolving department that houses a fantastic collection of surrealism, cubism, expressionism, and American modernism and contemporary art.

But on this spring morning, she has stepped away from her usual duties of research, writing, teaching and exhibition planning to guide a remarkably personal tour of the galleries.

On Chicago’s famed Michigan Avenue, the museum’s core beaux-arts building has a grand façade guarded by massive bronze lions. But on the other side of the building, going in through the back entrance is like finding the hidden door to a secret garden.

The museum isn’t open yet. Staffers prepare for the day behind the scenes in their simple, slate-gray offices. The galleries themselves, resplendent with polished marble, high ceilings and carefully directed lighting, are empty. We are eerily alone with master works of art. Statues of stone, portraits and landscapes in gilded frames seem to wait patiently for visitors. Footsteps echo in the quiet. Even the security guards are not yet in evidence.

“These are not just pretty pictures,” D’Alessandro says, “they are a reflection of our time.”

Here, Grant Wood’s famously dour American Gothic and Edward Hopper’s strangely fluorescent Nighthawks hang quietly, as though blissfully unaware of their pop-culture importance. In another room, millions of dots make up the surprisingly large painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, by Georges Seurat. It’s that kind of museum.

The Old Guitarist is an oil on panel from Pablo Picasso’s blue period. “It is literally multi-layered,” D’Alessandro says, telling the painting’s secrets. She describes the close, low angle from which the outline of another painting is visible beneath the surface. By standing closer than a security guard might allow and bending awkwardly as though looking up the painting’s skirt, the hidden work can be seen, but not without being shown where to look. “It was painted on a table top,” she says, “right over something he had painted before.”

D’Alessandro’s position as curator allows her the luxury to look carefully enough to see that which the rest of us may stroll past, and to use the tools of her trade to learn works of art from the inside out. She and her colleagues recently had used infrared light, for example, to see an under drawing while reframing Franz Marc’s The Bewitched Mill.

But her education and experience may be the best tools at her disposal. It was while she was studying in Dickinson’s Bologna program that her life took a serious turn toward art.

“It was one of the best years of my life,” she says. “I chose Dickinson for international studies because I liked to travel and explore cultures. I made art when I was in high school, but [during my junior year] in Italy I went to museums, like a futurism exhibit in Venice. I was blown away that art could so infiltrate life. And I realized what I wanted.”

She called Professor of Art and Art History Sharon Hirsh. “I told her the sob story,” D’Alessandro says. “So I took classes all [crammed together] in my senior year. Sharon set the bar very high and treated us like young art historians.”

Hirsh asked D’Alessandro to examine her academic future. “She said, ‘If you want all this, you have to get a Ph.D.’ ”

D’Alessandro came to the University of Chicago and stayed for her master’s and doctoral studies. By doing so, she carried on something of a “family” tradition by working with Rheinhold Heller, a professor of art history and Germanic languages and literature who also had been Hirsh’s teacher.

“The Germans have a word that describes Rheinhold Heller,” D’Alessandro says. “It means doctor-father. It’s a respectful, familiar relationship with mutual admiration and compassion.”

Her studies in the University of Chicago’s graduate programs were intense. “It was a great deal of work, but Sharon gave generously of herself,” D’Alessandro says. “She was someone I could find on the phone. Forever she will be the one person who made everything possible to me. Last year I got to walk through the galleries with Sharon. I was so proud to show her.”

When D’Alessandro began at the museum, she was a postdoctoral fellow through the Mellon Foundation. When the fellowship was over, the museum asked her to stay and went so far as to create a position for her.

“It was a dream come true. I wanted to make art accessible and give people the excitement I have experienced. As a younger curator of modern art, I wanted to address how to draw young people to the museum. With works of art like these,” she says, standing near Paul Klee’s Dancing Girl, “I can make people feel excited. Now I can give back.”

The Wildest House Tour Ever
Adjacent to Michigan Avenue, curator Marla Hand opens the door to her workplace with the graceful presence of a hostess. Her surroundings are surreal. This is the top floor of the Ritz-Carlton, the penthouse apartment. Inside, the nighttime view out the window is the Navy Pier. The lights on the ferris wheel are beautiful, childlike, but a view such as this, one that would normally be breathtaking, pales in comparison to the contents of the apartment.

Here, there is a collection of art that is so bountiful that it seems to carry its own childlike glee. Every available inch of space is covered with art.

For a moment, it’s impossible to speak. While helplessly drawn to the Toulouse-Lautrec in the corner of the living room, you breeze past the Lichtenstein hanging near the kitchen. Such a thing inspires guilt. How could you walk past art of this magnitude? But there is no time for guilt. The Renoir in the bedroom beckons, if you can just get past the Warhol in the hall.

Marla Hand oversees The Robert B. Mayer Family Collection, Chicago. Among the art that dominates every square inch of Mrs. Meyer's apartment/art repository in the Ritz-Carlton is Wayne Thiebaud's Quick Snack and Robert Rauschenberg's Buffalo II (pictured above).

To stand so close, to see these works of art in a living room, in a bedroom, office and hall rather than in a gallery, is astounding. But this isn’t just any apartment; it’s Mrs. Robert B. Mayer’s apartment.

On this spring evening, “Buddy” Mayer is visiting her other home in Florida, but her presence, her generous spirit, remains strong in the apartment. Many tours have passed through the collection; not just art dignitaries, but groups of school children have been here.

As the daughter of the late Nathan Cummings, Mrs. Mayer often reminisces that she started life as a “simple grocer’s daughter,” Hand says. As a reminder of those early days, Richard Estes’ painting, Key Foods, presides over Mrs. Mayer’s desk. And though her father built an empire known as Sara Lee Corp., with brand-name holdings like Hanes, Hillshire Farms, Playtex, L’Eggs, Kiwi Shoe Polish and Wonderbra, Hand says Mrs. Mayer continues to view herself in an unassuming way.

With her husband, the late Robert B. Mayer, who was an inspired art collector even before he met his wife, she traveled the world, meeting artists and collecting art with a vision that can barely be understood in hindsight.

“It’s eclectic,” Hand says with a laugh. “The Mayers began buying art in the ’40s. The first painting they purchased together was a portrait by Renoir. Impressionist works were generally frowned upon because they were thought to be messy and sloppy, not at all the sensation they’ve now become. As the price of impressionist paintings outpaced the Mayers’ pocketbook, they turned to more modestly priced avant-garde art such as abstract expressionism in the ’50s and pop art in the ’60s. The Mayers were forerunners in pop art. When they bought Lichtenstein’s Keds and hung it in their dining room with French provincial furniture, neighbors and fellow collectors thought they were nuts. But, showing the signs of being progressive collectors, the Mayers were open not only to the impressionists but to the eclectic.

As proof, in this apartment, Rivers, Rauschenberg and Dine live side-by-side with glass-enclosed shelves full of mostly Chinese art from the Han and T’ang dynasties. The oldest piece is a Japanese haniwa (burial-mound sculpture) from 200 BC.

Before the sudden death of Mr. Mayer almost 30 years ago, Hand says the Mayers lived in a mansion with seven galleries in Winnetka, Ill. At that time, the collection exceeded 3,000 pieces. Now, though still awe-inspiring, the collection is one-fifth its original size. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Mayer moved to an apartment in the city.

To accommodate the art in the galleries and on the grounds, she instituted the Robert B. Mayer Loan Collection, a unique program where art is loaned to museums, many of them at universities, for educational purposes. Mrs. Mayer also sold and donated some of the art to several museums, among them gifts of 121 pieces of African art to Howard University and contemporary pieces to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, of which Mr. Mayer was a founder.

Hand’s job is to keep track of and care for the art—where it is, how it gets there and gets back, insurance issues, conservation and cataloguing. She also responds to special exhibition requests here and abroad and researches the art’s provenance.

“I literally landed here,” Hand says of her 22 years as Mrs. Mayer’s curator. “I was in the right place at the right time. I came straight from Carlisle to the University of Chicago [for an M.A. and Ph.D.]. Mrs. Mayer was on the Visiting Committee of the Art Department at the university. I was a graduate assistant at the Smart Museum and was recommended to Mrs. Mayer. I’ve been with her ever since.”

The collection Hand curates is a personal one. It can be viewed like a “scrapbook” of postcards, a chronicling of the Mayers’ life together and their travels. “Each piece of art has a story for Mrs. Mayer,” Hand says.

There is a Picasso still life that Mr. Mayer bought directly from the artist in his studio in Vence, France. While there, Mr. Mayer got a letter of introduction from Picasso to take with him to Matisse’s studio, where he paid Matisse $75—all Mr. Mayer had left in his pocket—for a drawing.

In Mexico, Hand says, “The Mayers literally climbed a ladder to see Diego Rivera, [in a setting] like a tree house and commissioned two paintings of a boy and a girl.”

Perhaps the most touching story involves a Chagall painting, The Troth. It is a self-portrait of the artist with his first wife, Bella. Years after the painting was purchased, while Marc Chagall was in Chicago working on his famous mosaic, The Seasons, he sought out the Mayers, and when he saw the painting, the artist became very emotional. It was the first time he had seen it since Bella’s death.

“This is a very important collection in terms of the history of art in Chicago,” Hand says. “The Mayers were visionaries. Mrs. Mayer no longer collects avidly; that was something special she and her husband did together. Now, she is an enthusiastic philanthropist, working on projects such as bringing wheelchairs to disabled children in Israel, working for the Foundation for Fighting Blindness and advocating for handicapped accessibility. She uses art in all sorts of ways to bring people together for a common cause. She is incredibly energetic. Sometimes I go home breathless after a day at work.”

Hand also teaches art history at Loyola University. “I love having the balance of the acadmic and curatorial worlds.”

The strong bond of art to education was formed during Hand’s time at Dickinson. “Sharon Hirsh was absolutely a major influence on me,” she says. “I was a language major when I went to Nantes, France, for my junior year. When I came back, we looked at my transcript, and she said with a little work, I could also have an art-history major. I connected with it. I didn’t know anything about art until I went to Dickinson. I grew up near Philadelphia and New York City and never went in an art museum. At Dickinson, [Professor of German] Dieter Rollfinke and Sharon Hirsh team-taught a German expressionist art and literature course that was more inspiring than some of my graduate classes.”

In Chicago, Hand is part of an artistic and academic community. “There is a great network of Dickinson people here,” she says, referring especially to the respect she feels for her friend and colleague, Stephanie D’Alessandro. Since Hand and D’Alessandro both studied first with Hirsh at Dickinson and then with Heller during graduate school at the University of Chicago, they share important ties.

Back at the Art Institute of Chicago, D’Alessandro expresses the same thought. “When we all get together,” she says, “Sharon, Rheinhold Heller, Marla and I—it’s like a family dinner.” •